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 Cormac McCarthy For a writer whose works revel in the shadows of human nature, Cormac McCarthy had a remarkably conventional childhood. He was born Charles Joseph McCarthy in Providence, Rhode Island on July 20, 1933. He later changed his name to Cormac, meaning 'son of Charles', to honor his father. Tennessee became his new home in 1937, when his family moved to Knoxville. His father, a lawyer, took a job with the Tennessee Valley Authority legal staff and remained with the TVA for the next thirty years. Cormac grew up in the Catholic church, attended Catholic high school and then enrolled in The University of Tennessee in 1951. He completed only one year, however, before deciding to enlist in the U.S. Air Force. He served four years in the military, two of them on duty in Alaska, before returning to the University of Tennessee in 1957. Yet, though his childhood biography might read without calling attention to a defining moment or climactic event that would shape his impending career, a number of key themes running through Cormac's works ? peregrination, human affinity for bloodshed, father-son relationships ? can be found explicitly and latently in his formative experiences. He then returned to the University of Tennessee and found himself slowly gravitating towards fiction writing. After publishing two stories in the The Phoenix, the campus literary magazine, he won an Ingram-Merrill Foundation grant for creative writing in both 1959 and 1960. Convinced of his potential for success, he left The University of Tennessee in 1960 to pursue his writing career. After marrying and fathering a son, he moved to Chicago and became an auto mechanic to support himself while he worked on his first novel. Soon after, he returned to Tennessee with his wife, but the marriage dissolved. His personal troubles certainly didn't distract from his work ? he published his debut in 1965, The Orchard Keeper, and was recognized with the William Faulkner Award. McCarthy never suffered from a lack of critical success or support. In 1965, he won an American Academy of Arts and Letters traveling fellowship to Europe and boarded an ocean liner to Ireland. He met Anne Dulsie on this trip, who he married in England in 1966. That same year, he was awarded a Rockefeller Foundation grant, allowing him to tour Europe with his wife. After traveling through England, France, Switzerland, Italy, and Spain, the McCarthys settled in Ibiza so Cormac could finish revising his second novel, Outer Dark. In what seemed like a routine, McCarthy won another fellowship in 1969 ? this time, the Guggenheim. He moved with his wife to Louisville, Tennessee where he fully renovated a barn into a home while leisurely working on his third novel, Child of God. In 1976, McCarthy separated from Dulsie and moved to El Paso, Texas. Perhaps unsettled by the changes in his life, McCarthy returned to the familiarity of his creative nemesis ? Suttee, a manuscript with which he had been struggling for twenty years. His perseverance was rewarded in 1979 ? critics hailed the book as his finest (some argue that he never surpassed it) and he was awarded the prestigious MacArthur Foundation Grant. If critical accolades were a mainstay of McCarthy's career, popular success was not. But with the publication of Blood Meridian in 1985, his work began to gain the attention of the mainstream. Declared one of the best novels of the twentieth century by critic Harold Bloom, Blood Meridian perhaps best captures the bleak cynicism at the core of McCarthy's body of work. In chronicling the escapades of a young runaway who joins a bloodthirsty gang in their Indian hunts, Meridian reveals the darker shades of human character, the inevitability of suffering and violence. McCarthy certainly didn't apologize for these themes ? indeed, in a rare interview to the New York Times, he seemingly rejects not only the possibility for harmonious living, but also the idea that human beings can seek to change their aggressive instincts: "There is no such thing as life without bloodshed? The notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is really a dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous." (New York Times Magazine, 1992). His most famous novel, All the Pretty Horses, also depends on its characters swirling in on this maelstrom of unforeseen, inescapable evil. Despite its bleak themes, the book built upon the acclaim of Meridian and found both critical attention and commercial success in 1992. In addition to remaining a New York Times bestseller for six months, it won the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award, further evidence that critics were unanimous in declaring it the best work of fiction of that year. McCarthy has since published the two remaining books in The Border Trilogy that began with Horses ? The Crossing and Cities on the Plain, which unites the two lead characters from the first books in the series. He continues to live in El Paso, Texas, rarely granting interviews, reliably silent about his work. |
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